Guillermo Del Toro may have lost out on adapting his dream project, the H.P. Lovecraft story “At the Mountains of Madness”, but from all accounts, he’s already moved on to prepping the Legendary Pictures/Warner Bros. “Pacific Rim”, a monster movie that should be perfect for a man of Del Toro’s skill set.

The boys at NewsinFilm (via CBM) have apparently gotten their hands on Travis Beachum’s script, and they seem to really dig it. Here is their review, which includes First Act introductions to the various characters and the film’s overall plot:

…not much is known about Pacific Rim yet, other than it’s about giant monsters and will allow del Toro to create a “new world” of beastly creatures. That’s only halfway accurate. This project will give the Hellboy filmmaker the opportunity to create two worlds.

The first is an alternate version of Earth in the near future, decades after a historic date in November 2012 when the first kaiju, a towering Godzilla-like beast, emerged from a hole in the Pacific Ocean and attacked the city of Osaka, Japan. The second is “The Anteverse,” another universe on the other side of that gaping portal, 5 miles below our ocean’s surface.

Since the first attack, the rim has been “spitting out” a variety of gigantic monsters at an increasing rate, which then stride out of the ocean and begin destroying sea-bordering cities, like Tokyo and Los Angeles. In order to combat these monstrous, otherworldly menaces, the military developed the “Jaeger” program, which trains teams of two pilots to jointly operate massive, building-sized mechanized suits of armor and high-tech weaponry.

Within the first act alone, we are given enough detailed background on the god-like Jaeger systems, its shared neural piloting system (called “pons”), and the relentless beasts. But Beacham is an absolute master at immediately establishing characters and their conflicts.

The central character is Raleigh Antrobus, 23, a skilled Jaeger pilot still wrestling emotionally with the loss of his co-pilot and biological brother, Yance, during a mission a year earlier. The ordeal has wreaked havoc on his mind spirit, leaving him with ghostly nightmares of the battle from the shared “pons” experience. After the initial setup, the damaged hero is recruited to re-join the task force in Tokyo, where pilots are in demand, and team with a fellow “leftover,” 22-year-old female Japanese pilot Mako Mori. Naturally, the language barrier (among other things) presents an issue for the out-of-sync duo, meaning an even steeper learning curve for the unprecedented pairing.

Meanwhile, Felicity “Flick” Kincaid, a journalist and Yance’s former fiancée, circles the globe (ours) to discover answers about this mysterious rift and the origins of its intensifying threat.

Without ruining any more surprises (past the first act), there are several different species of towering kaiju, each with their own unique characteristics, and the clashes between monster and machine are epic in scale.

So, giant “kaiju” monsters (think Godzilla, but without Godzilla), huge, towering human-piloted mechas, and a mostly Japanese setting. Basically, it sounds like Travis Beachum is a pretty big fan of Japanese monster movies.